Tag Archives: craft

Peep Game Comix: “Attention All African American comic book creators and publishers, we are looking for original titles to add to Peep Game Comix. We are looking for current projects and even back catalogs of books.”

Hurricanes with women’s names more deadly: study | Joan Cary at Chicago Tribune (June 2): “According to a recent study by University of Illinois researchers, hurricanes with women’s names are likely to cause significantly more deaths than those with masculine names — not because the feminine-named storms are stronger, but because they are perceived as less threatening and so people are less prepared.”

Why Have Female Hurricanes Killed More People Than Male Ones? | Ed Yong at National Geographic (June 2): “Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity… But Jeff Lazo from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research disagrees. He’s a social scientist and economist who has looked into the public communication of hurricane risk, and he thinks the pattern is most likely a statistical fluke, which arose because of the ways in which the team analysed their data.” (Study authors respond at comment #7.)

Do Female-Named Hurricanes Need To Lean In? | Beth Novey at NPR (June 3): “We’re also worried about what this trend means for the career advancement of female storms. We’ve seen this before. We know where this is going. So to get ahead of the curve, we’d like to offer some advice to all the girls out there hoping to become fearsome natural disasters when they grow up.”

We Can Be Atheists Without Being Jerks | s.e. smith at this ain’t livin’ (June 3): “I wasn’t aware that atheism came with a requirement to be an asshole to people of faith, to mock, belittle, and hurt them for believing in something different than you do — and the hostility towards religion from prominent atheists these days makes me, at times, embarrassed to call myself one.”

Goodbye to All That: Today Is Katie Cotton’s Last Day at Apple | Kara Swisher at Re/code (May 30): “Consider the various words used to describe her: ‘Queen of Evil,’ ‘wicked witch,’ ‘cold and distant,’ ‘frigid supremacy,’ ‘queen bee’ and, perhaps most obviously misogynistic, “dominatrix.”… it’s both sad and disturbing that it’s still okay to talk about a high-ranking woman in this way and make it seem as if it was a cogent and valid commentary on her performance as a professional executive.”

Codes of conduct aren’t enough | Coral Sheldon-Hess at Web Kunoichi (May 29): “I’m not arguing against codes of conduct, here. I’m just saying, a code of conduct isn’t enough; it’s a good first step, but you can’t adopt one (even a good one) and then pat yourself on the back that your community is safe and welcoming and beautiful. If we want our communities and events to be safe and welcoming, we need to build a culture of mutual support, of standing up for one another and not letting anyone be mistreated or made to feel uncomfortable for being who they are.”

The Gentrifier’s Guide to Getting Along | Chinaka Hodge at San Francisco Magazine (May 30): “The core of what this means is that your new neighbors, we folks who have been here, who remember Oakland before we were Michelin starred, Decemberists headlined, or Times approved, are traumatized. We are hurt, confused, angry, and disillusioned. We lost people, we lost homes, we lost agency, we lost our favorite eateries—we even lost the ability to name our hoods.”

How to Get Girls Into Coding | Nitasha Tiku at the New York Times (May 31): “So what if, instead of trying to guess at what might get girls interested in technology, we looked at what’s already on their screens? While parents often worry about recreational ‘screen time,’ some educators now believe that gaming could be a way to get girls interested in coding, and even to increase the numbers of girls in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — classes and schools.”

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Like many geeks, I’m a big fan of making things or hacking them to suit my needs. A friend recently asked if all female programmers are also knitters, and while I think that’s unlikely (I only learned to knit two weeks ago, and I’ve been a programmer for getting close to two decades), it does make a lot of sense that people who are good at writing code might be drawn to other types of patterns such as the algorithms used to generate knitted and crocheted items. What do you think?

And while I’ve got the maker spirit, here’s two three geeky things I made this week:

This hardly counts as something I made, as all I did was make a little circle of wire to attach this very shiny USB key to a necklace, but the end result is a reasonably cheap and totally functional piece of geeky jewelry. Bonus: the USB key is waterproof, so I don’t have to worry about it getting wet if I get caught in a downpour or sprint all the way to work. This is the kind of pregnancy necklace or pendant that I would want to receive on my baby shower!

I’m not usually an early adopter for hardware since it’s so easy to get burned, but I snagged a Kindle Fire before Christmas and haven’t regretted it. What I *do* regret is that cases can be so darned expensive! I learned to knit less than a week before making this, so it’s clearly a project suitable for a beginner. Instructions here for those who like patterns (or just want to know what yarn that is).

Edit: I forgot another geeky thing I made last week on the plane:Penguin Ball

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve crocheted a lot of Angry Birds as an excuse to play games with strangers and friends alike. The round penguin pattern I made as an extension of that for when I was playing “real life Angry Birds” around open source folk, as a reference to the Linux penguin. This is one of a bunch I made for the Pycon sprints, where I gave them out to my fellow GNU Mailman developers. If you want to make your own, it’s a very quick project: I wrote the pattern up here.

So… while all female programmers probably aren’t also knitters, I know there’s a lot of makers of various stripes within the Geek Feminism community. Please tell us about the cool things you’ve been making in the comments below!

On being a woman and a non-physicist at CERN: I… feel like people here, men especially, treat me like some sort of novelty item. Like because I am not a physicist, I have nothing substantive to contribute to CERN, but it’s cute that I try.

Rebuttal: Make Room In the Bubble For Everyone: Being gender-blind or race-blind or truly meritocratic is an incredibly worthy aspiration, but there’s plenty of research including new neuroscience to demonstrate it isn’t possible without actively mitigating individual and organizational biases.

Questions for Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo: Like few others in the whole process, [the Playtex seamstresses] really had the lives of the astronauts literally in their hands. They had a skill and dedication that was unparalleled. The same women have made U.S. space suits all the way up to the shuttle and space station era, so the skill is by no means obsolete.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Talk on June 15 at Melbourne University: Dr Cathy Foley, 100 years later: has anything changed for women in science?: This talk will look at what is the status of women in science in Australia, report on the Women in Science and Engineering summit held in Parliament House in April this year. I will then reflect on ways to enhance careers for women in science and the need not only for equity but also for improved productivity and innovation by capturing the full human potential in Australia.

The Australian talks about online harassment of (female) journalists, which will sound familiar to many other women online: [Trigger warning: online harassment/bullying] War of the Words

And therein lies the Catch-22 for women in the cyber-firing line. On the one hand, they believe it is essential to expose the level of abuse and misogyny that has flourished on the largely unregulated new media. On the other, they fear the only effect that would have is to discourage women from participating in public debates.

Forever 21 Pulls “I’m Too Pretty To Do Math” Magnet From Online Store: Our submitter writes: OK, it’s not just bad that this was made in the first place. But around the article? Let’s see, You might like: The Top 10 Lies Women Tell Men; 12 Stars Posing Naked With Super Random Props; and the poll of important information: Does Flirting Over Facebook & Twitter Count As Cheating?; Please Just Kill Me NOW.

[Trigger warning: very frank anti-rape campaign] Don’t be that guy: a surprisingly refreshing anti-rape campaign targeting men is now making its way to other Canadian cities.

Typically, sexual assault awareness campaigns target potential victims by urging women to restrict their behavior. Research is telling us that targeting the behavior of victims is not only ineffective, but also contributes to how much they blame themselves after the assault. That’s why our campaign is targeting potential offenders – they are the ones responsible for the assault and responsible for stopping it. By addressing alcohol-facilitated sexual assault without victim-blaming, we intend to mark Edmonton on the map as a model for other cities.

Rebecca Koeser of Emory University, won a prize in the DevCSI challenge at Open Repositories 2011 for her use of Microsoft Pivot as a repository-visualization tool. Here’s a picture of Koeser accepting her prize.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Note: this is an open thread, and comments can be on any topic as long as they are otherwise ok with our policy. An increasing number of commenters are posting apologies for off-topicness on the open thread. Nothing is off-topic on the open thread! We promise! Hyperbolic crochets are only the start of what you could talk about!

We’re hopping to play some line games with random strangers and toss some into crowds to see what happens. If you’re looking to spot me or my companions at PAX east, we’ll have a few of these pinned to the outside of our bags, and we’ll be goofing off with them when we’ve got time to spare waiting for concerts and such.

I made my own patterns for these because I wanted smaller simpler ones so I could make plenty of birds before the con, and I’m hoping to write up these easy angry bird patterns to share when I’ve got time to take a few in-progress photos to go with them. But if you’re dying to make your own Angry Birds right now, I highly recommend you check out Itsy Bitsy Spider’s patterns (ravelry link) The red bird pattern is free, and the rest are only a few dollars each.

And before I finish this post… here’s more pictures of my angry birds! That’s not even all of them, just the ones that happen to be in my house right now. I can’t wait to see what it looks like when we have them all together.

Mary Greville was born to a well-connected aristocratic family and had the benefits of an excellent education, although her particular branch of the family was not well-off, leading to her first, very unhappy, marriage to a much older man. During the course of her long life, she engaged in various forms of craftwork, including embroidery and making shell designs, and what she is perhaps most famous for, a series of flower collages in paper. While these, and her embroideries reveal the skill of her hands and the quality of her taste, they also demonstrate accurate botanical details of the flowers she depicted.

Along with her close friend, the Duchess of Portland, Delany was part of an extensive circle of individuals with an informed interest in the eighteenth century development of the study of nature in its numerous forms, and who were introducing the new Linnaean system of classification. Her collages were praised by such authorities as Sir Joseph Banks. Art, science and craft were intricately associated in her life and her productions.

A few Penny Arcade fans with little grasp of basic human decency and even less grasp of basic grammar and spelling have really been making for an unpleasant week. The last linkspam has related links if you’re curious. It’s not pretty.

BUT… I actually have tickets for PAX East. I decided to go long before this whole debacle because I’ve enjoyed PAX prime in the past, and a friend of mine has had an incredibly rough year so a bunch of us planned the trip partially as a present to her. She’s much more important to me than a bunch of jerks are, so backing out is not an option for me.

Rather than let the actions of a few people ruin something I enjoy, I’m going to step away from that part of things and talk about why I’m still excited about the trip.

Jane McGonigal is a keynote speaker! She’s done some amazing work on gaming and how it can be used to make more real-world impact, and when I was still teaching game design, I’d often talk about her work with my students. She’s an awesome female game designer and an inspiring speaker. I’ve watched her TED talk, and I’m totally stoked about seeing her keynote.

Angry Birds! My friend and I have been crocheting angry birds and greedy pigs from the game Angry Birds to use for playing line games with strangers. We’ll set up some structures with the pigs and offer up birds to knock them over. Or maybe we’ll just make angry bird noises and toss them into crowd to see what happens (we’re hoping to have a bunch to give away!) Line games are a real feature at PAX, since you do spend a lot of time waiting in line, and in previous years my group has had a ball meeting strangers next to us in line and playing DS games or just chatting. Honestly, I’m not usually a fan of waiting, but it makes a break from the noisier show floor and a great excuse to meet people who are at least interested in the same panel.

Okay, I’m not done with the Angry Birds thing yet. Check out this partially finished amigurumi cutie I made while hashing out a pattern for smaller birds!

Awesome friends! I’ve got a nicely-sized gang of friends going, so if I’m feeling shy I don’t have to talk to anyone I don’t know. I’m particularly looking forwards to vacationing with this year’s party, and I expect those of us travelling together will have a total blast in transit too.

Concerts! With geeky music! I love live music, but often shows are marred by drunken morons. However, on top of not allowing booth babes, PAX also has all-ages evening shows all ages so there’s no booze. Yeay for feeling safer and not having to deal with drunks who bash into me! Plus thanks to the popularity of music games, you can’t beat a gamer crowd for ability to clap in time and sing in tune. (It totally freaked me out the first time I heard everyone *actually* clapping in unison.) And I’m still amused by the Nintendo DSes being used in place of lighters/cell phones:

New games! I love getting to try new demos and poke around games I maybe wouldn’t have tried except that there happened to be a controller free. I often wind up with some beta keys to share, too, so I can do things like check out the big lego massively multiplayer game in my own time and even with friends. And it’s not just computer and console games: I love walking into the board game rooms and immediately having someone flag us down to try something out. “You’ve got to try this game! It’s called ‘We didn’t playtest this at all!'” (turns out it’s a fun, quick, if exceptionally silly card game!)

Swag! I got a dozen T-shirts at PAX prime in 2010, and some of them even fit me beautifully! Other favourites include posters, fun buttons, cute plushies and even an amazing artbook from the Guild Wars 2 team. Last time I brought back a paper zombie cone (from Plants Vs Zombies) to give to a young girl who I know loved the game.safety cones plus zombie safety conesby Solarbird.

Costumes and gamer geek wear! We probably aren’t going to have any big costumes ourselves this year, but it’s a great excuse to wear goofy hats, and I love seeing what other people have done. Check out the koopa backpack I made for last time:

So there’s a few reasons and I’m feeling better already. Anyone got any upcoming events you’re excited about? Anyone planning to go to the first GirlGeekCon in the fall which promises to be a potential alternative for women who (understandably) might prefer to give PAX a miss? Anyone been making neat amigurumi or other geeky toys and want to share? Let me know.

NOTE: I’m really serious about wanting this post to be about fun stuff: a unicorn chaser to this week for me. So please, you want to be negative, try another post. The latest linkspam may be an appropriate place for such things. They will not be published on this post.

A Very Special Episode of Grey Areas: Privilege Denying Dude Edition: In social justice, not all tactics that are divisive are effective, but all tactics that are effective are divisive. That doesn’t mean we should set our phasers to divide, but when a tactic is labeled as divisive or radical, there is a chance it might be one worth considering.

15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics: Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you… This simple writing exercise may not seem like anything ground-breaking, but its effects speak for themselves.

Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora: Sarah Mei writes The “gender” field in a person’s profile was originally a dropdown menu, with three choices: blank, male, and female. My change made it an optional text field that was blank to start. A wide open frontier! Enter anything you want.

Grandma’s Superhero Therapy (18 photos) – My Modern Metropolis: GO SUPER MAMIKA!!!!! A few years ago, French photographer Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he suggested that they shoot a series of outrageous photographs in unusual costumes, poses, and locations.

New-ish site you might want to check out: Ars Marginal: So much of the arts and entertainment we get exposed to is by and for straight White guys*. We figured it’s time for us to talk about what we get out of it. Because, frankly, we’re tired of that shit. Ars Marginal flips the script and looks at movies, TV shows, comic books, and games from our point of view.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the geekfeminism tag on delicious or the #geekfeminism tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

I’ve recently gotten back in to cross stitching, after a twelve year break. The first thing I tried was this Firefox pattern from Radical Cross-stitch. It was not too difficult, and a good nerdy way to start.

I have high aspirations, though. I’m really interested in gaming type cross stitches; in particular I love this cross stitch Zelda map.

My latest project is a stitching of the Melbourne tram map. I’m stitching it without a pattern, and hoping for the best, really. You may remember the London tube cross stitch. It’ll be like that, only more yellow.

There’s been a resurgence, or a growth I guess, of ‘radical’ or reinterpreted craft. No flowers and doggies and quotes from the bible, it’s all breasts and vulvas and expletives undeleted. This reimaging of craft as a feminist radical endeavour is fun and interesting, and lots of crafters talk about empowerment, but the majority of this radical craft is Western-based (I don’t have stats or references for this claim, just from what I see as I cruise around the crafting blogs, but if you’ve found a stash of non-Western-based craft blogs then hand them over), very knitting and cross-stitch focussed, and incredibly time consuming. It seems almost class-based, which I suppose is inevitable – it took me a month to do that Firefox, who has time for that, you know? So there are lots of questions for me about the feminist empowerment of this craft movement, and the appropriateness of talking about it in these terms.

I am new to the world of radical crafting, though, and am very interested to hear the thoughts of others in this area.